Congratulations
OK, let me say that I've not used my Desire for a year now, so I have no experience of KitKat ROMs for the Desire. I in fact used Gingerbread (2.3) ROMs for my daily use, as these worked better than any ICS ROMs, and were also faster than Jelly Bean on that hardware (though the JB ROM I played with was better than the ICS ROMs I'd tried). So I simply do not know how good the KK ROMs are, and cannot recommend which ones to try.
That said, the place to find ROMs is the
Desire Android Development forum at XDA. There's an
index thread there which will help you find your way round. The most important thing is to read the first couple of posts of each thread to find out what the requirements are for installing a particular ROM. In particular, what hboot and what size sdcard partition?
These are things described in the
root memory faq in this forum. When loading a ROM that's smaller than the stock Sense ROM we would use custom hboots to reduce the size of the /system partition (where the ROM lives) and give more space for user apps. Many ROMs could use a second partition on the SD card to give you more space for installing apps. But if you want to install KK then these things are more important than giving more space. The KK ROM willprobably be
larger than the stock HTC ROM, so you probably do not want to use a "smaller" hboot. That means you will need a partition to give you more app storage, but it's also likely that you'll need the partition to fit part of the ROM in (i.e. the ROM may well not install unless you have partitioned the card). This is why I say it's important to read the ROM's requirements before installing.
Partitioning the card will probably erase anything currently on it, so it's important to back your card up completely before starting to do that.
As for installing a ROM (assuming you've already partitioned the card), the procedure is:
* take a backup using your custom recovery (a "nandroid" backup). This will let you restore your old ROM and data if you need to. The nandroid backup is stored on your SD card.
* install Titanium Backup to back up your current apps/data if you wish to restore them on the new ROM (a nand backup restores the ROM as well, so can't be used for this purpose). Titanium Pro can back up messages in a format that be restored to a new ROM, but the free version does not, so if you use that you will need a second app to back up your message. If you do not sync your contacts with Google make sure you back them up too (you can just export them to the SD card from the phone app).
* To flash a ROM the general procedure is:
- download the ROM zip and copy it to your sd card
- go into recovery. Take a nandroid backup if you haven't done so recently.
- do a factory reset from recovery. You must not erase the SD card, but you do need to wipe the phone itself, as the system data will be incompatible with the new ROM
- select the "install zip" option from recovery. Select the ROM zip and install. Some ROMs include an installer script which may give you some choices to make.
- after installing the ROM, reboot the phone. The first boot may take a while, so don't panic.
- Once booted, set up the phone: enter your google login, re-sync your contacts, restore any user apps you want from Titanium (do not try to restore system apps or system settings - the point of the factory reset was to remove these data, so you'll just make trouble for yourself if you restore them again).
- If you don't like it or it doesn't work, restore your nandroid or try another ROM.
Note that a new ROM will be very different, so give it a bit of time to find out what it can do.
The various posts in the All Things Root Guide sticky post have more details about some of this stuff, but those are the principles. The main thing is to do the preparation, and with everything to read and make sure you know what you are doing before trying it.
Good luck